Deprived by injury of Ashley Cole and Sol Campbell, his two England defenders, Arsène Wenger started with 11 imports and had five more on the bench for the 5-1 drubbing of Crystal Palace, thereby sparking debate in pubs and workplaces from Gravesend to Gretna. It is a familiar topic, and one that was addressed in these columns by this correspondent in 1996, when I was upbraided by the then sports editor for suggesting a limit of six foreigners per team — a similar idea to that proposed by Uefa for next year.
Times and circumstances change and opinions can change with them. The quality of the foreign players coming here has improved considerably since television money made the Premiership the richest, and therefore the most attractive, labour market in world football. And at a time when the England team has its best crop of young players in recent memory, it is difficult to argue, as Glenn Hoddle did in 1996, that home-grown talent has been disadvantaged to the point of drying up. It is stating the bleedin’ obvious to say that if every club followed Arsenal’s example the England team would collapse, but that is never going to happen. Arsenal are the exception, and exceptional in more ways than one. The quality of the football they are capable of producing, the sublime entertainment they supply when they are at their coruscating best, mitigates powerfully in their favour.
Furthermore, the likes of Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires have been here, contributing in full measure, for years. Much less easy to defend than Wenger’s modus operandi is Bolton’s habit of hiring thirty-somethings (Fernando Hierro, Youri Djorkaeff, Ivan Campo, Mario Jardel, Bruno N’Gotty, Javi Moreno, Fredi Bobic, Stig Tofting) who are carpet-bagging for one last payday. Generally, however, there is not too much wrong with a balance that allows the likes of Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Jermain Defoe, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Joe and Ashley Cole and Ledley King to come through and thrive. Those banging on about dangerous, irreversible trends should remember that it was only five years ago that Chelsea were being castigated for fielding 11 foreigners in a Premier- ship match against Southampton. Now they have six England players on their books.
And did Frank Leboeuf and Marcel Desailly really block Terry’s progress? Hardly. He learnt so much from two World Cup winners he made them redundant. The cream will always rise to the top. It is true that Liverpool’s halcyon years in European competition came before the dressing room at Anfield became a Franco-Spanish babel, but was the old Boot Room nurturing English talent? Not with Bruce Grobbelaar, Mark Lawrenson, Alan Hansen, Ronnie Whelan, Steve Nicol, Graeme Souness, Craig Johnston, Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush in the team that famously beat Roma in their own backyard in 1984. Their “good old days” didn’t do much for Bobby Robson’s England.
In the interests of raising the debate above saloon-bar xenophobia, it is worth setting the issue in a historical context. There is nothing new about European teams recruiting abroad. In 1908, Bari, the Italian club where David Platt had a brief sojourn, included three Britons, two Swiss, an Austrian, a Frenchman and a Spaniard. Ninety Britons played in France between 1932 and 1939.
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The all-conquering Real Madrid team of the late fifties was fashioned around Alfredo Di Stefano from Argentina, France’s Raymond Kopa and Ferenc Puskas from Hungary, while in the seventies the North American Soccer League was an elephants’ graveyard for old pros from everywhere. In the magical year of 1966 the Football League was effectively a closed shop to foreigners, of whom there were just 10 in the four divisions. By comparison, there were 46 foreigners in the French league, 30 in Italy’s Serie A and 24 in (West) Germany’s Bundesliga. Alf Ramsey’s heroes apart, none of the 1966 World Cup stars played in Britain the following season, but at the 2002 tournament 106 of the 736 players involved came from English clubs.
Why the dramatic change? When domestic standards declined (England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups), market forces led clubs to import foreign players who could offer a higher level of skill at a reasonable price. Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa arrived from Argentina, but the old Yugoslavia were the biggest exporters (not just to Britain) for nearly two decades. The first footballers to come here in numbers from EC countries were from Holland, whose players were relatively inexpensive, and Denmark, where there was no professional league.
Otherwise, English clubs in the Seventies and Eighties were anti-European, in the belief that Continental players would not adapt to the hurly-burly of the English game or the lifestyle. Any stars they were prepared to gamble on they could not afford because at that stage Britain’s finest could not compete financially with their Spanish, and especially Italian, counterparts. At the start of the Eighties there were only 57 foreign players registered in the Football League, most of them (14) from Yugoslavia. In France there were 139 “guest workers” in the top three divisions, in the Bundesliga it was 92, in Spain 80 and in Serie A, where they were allowed one per team, 11.
In English football the number of arrivals increased sharply in the Nineties as part of a renaissance which saw the advent of the Premiership and television deals that allowed Premiership clubs to compete with their wealthy Italian rivals. By 1994 there were 141 foreigners playing in England, with most (15) from Norway. Elsewhere, there were 144 in France, 163 in Germany, 71 in Italy and 86 in Spain’s La Liga. Note that France had more foreigners than England, at a time when the French were bringing through the young players who would win the World Cup in 1998 and the European Championship two years later.
One trend is irreversible. Since the Bosman judgment, the labour market has been largely derestricted and more top European players now spend the greater part of their careers playing outside their country of origin, with the result that more top teams are composed largely of foreign players. The Premiership is packed with more international talent than ever before, making our football a star-studded spectacle that is the envy of television audiences across the world. The England team is a good one and would be even better if Sven-Göran Eriksson started justifying that grossly inflated salary and made it more closely resemble the sum of its parts.
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In short, as my old sports editor told me back in 1996: “The clock cannot be turned back. Gone are the days when you could serve up rubbish and expect fans to swallow it.”
For what it is worth, there are currently 303 non-British players registered with Premiership clubs and 301 Brits. A 50-50 split is hardly a takeover, even for the Little Englanders at the Daily Mail.